NCSA's Donna Cox spotlights power of cyberoutreach at TeraGrid'06

released 06.28.06

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Trish Barker
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This article originally appeared in the June 23 issue of HPCwire. Reprinted with permission.

INDIANAPOLIS — The TeraGrid plays a leading role in advancing science and engineering research, but during her plenary talk during TeraGrid 2006, Donna Cox also made a compelling case for its key role in outreach and education.

Cox leads the Visualization and Experimental Technologies group at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), one of the nine TeraGrid resource providers. In her talk, "CyberOutreach: Designing Science for Non-expert Audiences," Cox described how her team collaborates closely with discipline researchers to develop data-driven visualizations of complex scientific phenomena, from colliding galaxies to the swirling winds of a tornado. NCSA also develops analytics tools to help scientists mine and visualize meaning from their data. These visualizations help scientists gain insight, and they can also provide outreach and science education to general audiences through museum shows and high-definition television programs.

The creation of science-driven visualizations is a demanding process, requiring high-performance computing and networking resources to simulate phenomena, to share and transfer data, and to render high-resolution images from the data. "Cyberoutreach and informal education require cyberinfrastructure," Cox stressed.

Cox described and displayed visualizations from a number of cyberoutreach projects her team has completed over the past 20 years, including current projects that leverage the power of the TeraGrid to simulate, share, and visualize terabytes of data.

• "Cosmic Voyage" - This 1996 IMAX film pioneered the use cutting-edge research data to drive the visualization of complex concepts for a mainstream audience. Cox acted as art director for the data-driven visualization segment of the film, which shows the expansion of the universe, the gravitational collapse of structure and the formation of galaxies, and the collision of two spiral galaxies. The film was nominated for an Academy Award© in the Documentary (short subject) category.
• Visualization of an F3 tornado within a simulated supercell thunderstorm. A team of atmospheric scientists, led by NCSA chief science officer Robert Wilhelmson and Lou Wicker at the National Severe Storms Laboratory, used high-performance computers at NCSA to model the birth of a tornado, starting with data on the environmental conditions that produced a powerful tornado in South Dakota. The simulation helped the researchers zero in on the mechanisms that spawn a tornado, and the NCSA team then translated the data and insights into a dynamic, high-definition animated visualization. These visualizations were made accessible to millions of people through their inclusion in a NOVA show called "Hunt for the Supertwister."
• "Evolution of the Universe: Galaxies Forming on a Filamentary Structure." This visualization was developed through a collaboration between TeraGrid partners NCSA and the San Diego Supercomputer Center, where a team of astrophysicists led by Mike Norman (University of California, San Diego) completed the most highly defined spatial and temporal simulation of the universe using more than 10,000 CPU hours. The calculation involved 2,000 simulated snapshots of a wide expanse of the universe -- approximately 250 million light years across. Each snapshot signifies the passage of 6.8 million years, to encompass the nearly 14 billion years from the Big Bang to the present. The 26 terabytes of data generated by the simulation were mirrored to NCSA, where the visualization team used the data to create a breathtaking visualization of the origin and evolution of the universe. This work was shown at DomeFest and SIGGRAPH 2005.
• "Black Hole: The Other Side of Infinity." NCSA produced visualizations based on data gathered by the research team of Andrea Ghez (University of California Los Angeles); these observations of the orbital motion of 15 bright stars in the inner core of the Milky Way represent the best evidence yet that the center of our galaxy contains a massive black hole. The visualization shows 150 years of the stars' simulated motion along the reconstructed orbits, embedded in a 3D model -- partly artistic, partly science-based -- of the inner Milky Way. The tour begins about 2 light years from the black hole and approaches to within 1/30th of a light year. This animation was included in a planetarium dome show that debuted at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science and visualizations will also be included in a NOVA show scheduled to premiere this fall.

"It is very important that we reach beyond our TeraGrid community," Cox said in conclusion. "The knowledge gained through this research shouldn't just stay within the walls of academia or within esoteric journals. It is our obligation to take these visualizations that are enabled by cyberinfrastructure out to the public and to students and young people, to educate and inspire and pique their curiosity about science."

The TeraGrid, sponsored by the National Science Foundation Office of Cyberinfrastructure, is a partnership of people and a comprehensive collection of resources and services that enables and accelerates discovery in U.S. science and engineering research. Through coordinated grid middleware, policy, and high-performance network connections, TeraGrid integrates a distributed set of high capability computational, data management and visualization resources to make U.S. research more productive. TeraGrid's Science Gateway collaborations and education and mentoring programs interconnect and broaden scientific communities.

 

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